Signs of the times.
Ervin Laszlo refers to the chaos point we are at in terms of a full term pregnancy. Humanity needs to birth a new way of being. We are filling the womb, earth, to the bursting. We are using up all her resources and beginning to toxify our environment. Our existing systems can no longer meet our needs. Peak oil, global climate change, poverty, disease, marginalization of billions of people while plying them with advertisements showing them what they should have all add to the toxicity. In other terms we could say that the industrial age has run its course and the information age can’t get a breath yet. We are like two year olds fighting over real dump trucks. Our social, psychological, emotional maturity has fallen way behind our technological capacity. We need to move to a post-consumer economy but don’t know what that looks like yet.

Economies.
None of the economic systems of the past are going to serve us in this future. But just as Clare Graves concluded that each of the psychological systems he studied had part of the truth and formed these into what is now called Spiral Dynamics we must find the various parts of this puzzle that we can use. It will not serve us to revert to an old system. We must find the new pattern, in harmony with nature, in harmony with our inner natures and our planetary possibility, study it and support it.

Scale.
Back in 1809 Charles Fourier proposed Associations of 10,000 acres and 1800 people as the scale needed to create the human dynamics for successful living. Our present world scale economy seems a bit shakey, but that could be the influence of capitalism. Co-housing developments need about so many people to work well. Peak oil could help us discover appropriate economic scales. By postponing the real cost of transportation (global climate change) cheap oil has distorted economic boundaries. We need to find out how much of what we need to live fully we should be producing locally. This will establish the local economic unit. Then we need to discover what this local unit can produce for sale so it can buy those things it needs but cannot produce.

Community.
As I looked over intentional communities in SW WI and SE MN I noticed that most did not propose an economy. How will the community make money? Most leave that to the individual. I would suggest that a community enterprise may be essential. The resulting synergistics, creativity, purpose, mission, teamwork, and interactions will enliven both the individuals and the community while providing a cash flow.
Begin with an asset inventory, natural resources, human resources, spiritual resources, shared values and vision. How can we serve the world and get paid to do so? How can we grow this? How will it grow us?
An example: In a Permaculture oriented community trees are very important. Grow and sell Christmas trees and firewood. Nut and fruit trees and the honey from the bees needed to pollinate them could make a great line of original, healthy, candies and cookies for the holiday season. These would provide a variety of year round jobs and could be expanded in many ways.
The community economy satisfies human needs first and economic needs secondarily. The necessities of daily life are produced and consumed locally. Several communities could work together to man an industrial plant to produce a product for the world market. It is essential that the communities own the business so that its purpose continues to be to satisfy the human needs of the communities.

Why Community?
Learning to live and work together is essential to the evolution of the next phase of our global economy. Unless we devote energy and resources to this learning process we will push ourselves past the chaos point and into decline.